Mocking your API with Stoplight is your API design’s perfect companion. With Stoplight, you can have instant, hosted mock servers, powered by Prism, for your API as soon as you start the design. Don’t wait until you’ve written hundreds of lines of code and potentially wasted engineering resources to try out your API, start early on with mocking.

Stoplight provides REST API mock servers based on your OpenAPI Specification (formerly known as Swagger) document. Don’t worry about where to host the server, uptime, or updating it while you make changes to your API. Stoplight does this all for you. Need your mock servers to run on your own hardware? No problem! Stoplight provides multiple ways to run our Prism powered mock servers.

Sometimes known as service virtualization, mock servers are great for quickly standing up a fake version of your web service. With Stoplight, you can supercharge any OpenAPI Specification document. Mock servers can virtualize internal and external APIs and route incoming requests to example responses or dynamically generate responses on the fly based on your JSON Schema.

APIs, particularly within microservices, usually make many calls to other APIs. Those other APIs might, in turn, make calls to even more APIs. This creates a dependency chain nightmare. During testing, you can use service virtualization to cut that dependency chain off at the start.

The mock API server can accelerate the development of new APIs. Teams can work in parallel before the API is available through mocking; meanwhile, backend engineering teams can work on developing the API.